MOBILE/CONTACTLESS and omni-COMMERCE

Visa claims some merchants are already seeing as much as a third of payment volumes being made through Visa Checkout. The merchant rosta includes lastminute.com, The Hut Group (whose brands include lookfantastic, Zavvi and Myprotein), AXS, Domino’s, Ebuyer, HMV, Match.com and Mighty Deals, but could still be said to lack some major hitters.

The Shieldpay platform protects both payer and payee in any transaction by verifying the identity (and beneficial ownership) of all parties. Funds are held securely in the Shieldpay Vault, and are only released when both parties agree.

ABN claims Tikkie’s market share is 86% with a weekly average of 440,000 payment requests.

The German Cooperative banks are to rollout a new ‘Friends and Family’ mobile payment service in the Summer. http://tinyurl.com/y8c8xyz8

The launch that will enable users to make smartphone payments at POS using the VR-Banking app follows a successful pilot.

Alipay has announced that a group of Chinese travellers have made the first ever cashless journey to Finland, with all transactions throughout their trip made via their Alipay accounts. http://tinyurl.com/y8qycfn2

ACQUIRING/PROCESSING

The switch will not take place until mid-2020 with PayPal remaining as a payments option at checkout until July 2023. It is part of eBay’s move to intermediate payments on its Marketplace platform. eBay says that eBay that payments intermediation is strategically important to improve the buyer and seller experience on its platform (eBay will manage the entire checkout experience) and to support further innovation.

Wirecard is providing payment processing services for Advanon’s online factoring marketplace for SMEs as it launches in Germany. http://tinyurl.com/y9r4e6rw

Advanon, which already operates its invoice financing platform in Switzerland, will also be taking advantage of Wirecard’s German banking licence.

ATMs (LINK)

The main move is a series of reductions in interchange starting with 5% in July 2018 to achieve an overall reduction of 20%. There will be a shift of incentives for deploying ATMs from city centres to rural and less-affluent communities. There are a series of linked documents: Detailed LINK AnnouncementLINK Board Decision and Impact Assessment

The proposals have generated a good deal of comment containing some caveats.

The PSR generally welcomes the additional measures that LINK has said that it will introduce. However the PSR will continue to actively monitor developments based on monthly impact reports from LINK. http://tinyurl.com/y9gtgtaa

Treasury Select Committee says “Any significant reduction in free access to cash would be an unacceptable outcome”. It also places an explicit onus on the PSR to ensure no loss of access. http://tinyurl.com/yd4ktahq

Brexit will require a new relationship between two legal frameworks based on the mutual goal of ensuring a high standard of protection for citizens’ personal data. UKF says agreement over the adequacy of the respective data protection regimes may not be straightforward and work needs to be started now if a cliff-edge is to be avoided.

BLOCKCHAIN/DLT/CRYPTOCURRENCIES

The new body will highlight key developments of the blockchain technology, promote European actors and reinforce European engagement with multiple stakeholders involved in blockchain activities.

Banco Santander has said in its Q4/17 results release that it is partnering with Ripple to roll out DLT-based personal payments in Q1/18. The service will first go live in Spain, Brazil, the UK and Poland.

Mezi is a personal travel assistant app that helps consumers plan and book trips. Using AI it learns travellers’ preferences and the way customers make requests. The platform is already powering AskAmex, a personal concierge app for cardholders.

REGULATION

The PSR has issued information notices to Visa Europe and Mastercard in order to help the PSR to monitor compliance with caps on interchange fees. http://tinyurl.com/y8q7k2wo

The PSR has asked for reports on the gross amount of interchange fees paid by a subset of acquirers and received by a subset of issuers in the UK from 9 December 2015 to 31 December 2017. This will become an annual event, although not necessarily from the same schemes.